Revision as of 08:17, 27 November 2012

Networking features are nowadays important for virtually all users of Fedora and other
linux distributions. Fedora's main network use cases are laptops, desktops, servers
and virtualization. Fedora could also be used for routers, becoming part of networking
infrastructure.

A network management daemon to properly manage all of the above together with user configuration (NetworkManager)

Networking API for applications (glibc, with many problems)

I may have missed something but the objective is to show that networking is rather complex and the various tools need
to be centrally managed by a network management service in order to make users and administrators happy.

You can only live without network configuration daemons if you use static IP configuration and you avoid encrypted
wireless networks at the same time. You can live with just wpa_supplicant and dhclient only if you are used to do
most of the stuff yourself. Virtually all linux distributions now converge to network solutions based on network
configuration daemons.

Examples of such daemons (without feature comparison):

NetworkManager

connman (MeeGo)

WICD

netifd (OpenWRT)

netcfg (Archlinux)

wicked

Yeah, it's a lot of fun writing new and new network configuration daemons.